Papers › Practical Bayesian Learning of Neural Networks via Adaptive Optimisation Methods

Practical Bayesian Learning of Neural Networks via Adaptive Optimisation Methods

8 Nov 2018arXiv:1811.03679archive 2025-07-28

Samuel Kessler, Arnold Salas, Vincent W. C. Tan, Stefan Zohren, Stephen Roberts

We introduce a novel framework for the estimation of the posterior distribution over the weights of a neural network, based on a new probabilistic interpretation of adaptive optimisation algorithms such as AdaGrad and Adam. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our Bayesian Adam method, Badam, by experimentally showing that the learnt uncertainties correctly relate to the weights' predictive capabilities by weight pruning. We also demonstrate the quality of the derived uncertainty measures by comparing the performance of Badam to standard methods in a Thompson sampling setting for multi-armed bandits, where good uncertainty measures are required for an agent to balance exploration and exploitation.

PaperPDFCode

Code

skezle/BADAM officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Multi-Armed BanditsThompson Sampling

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdaGradAdam

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections